The Game
by Mythopoeia
Summary: He couldn't understand why a person as beautiful as Amelia could be unhappy. It was wrong, and it was fascinating, and it drew him to her as though she was a song being sung out of tune. If he could only listen long enough then he could put it right.


**Disclaimer:** I do not own and am not affiliated with anything or anyone "Doctor Who". Sadly enough. No copyright infringement intended.

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><p>They had it all wrong-his Mum, and his Dad, and all of his classmates who loved to watch from behind the hedgerows or the top of the monkey bars, hooting and jeering and tossing bits of bark and gravel to distract him. They all thought that the only reason why he played the game was because he fancied her.<p>

That wasn't it at all. Or, well, perhaps it was partially true, but confused pre-pubescent infatuation wasn't enough on its own to make him don her father's old blue dress shirt (which she had cut haphazard holes in with her sharp little craft scissors) and necktie and filch his own father's screwdriver from the tool kit and use up an entire pack of blue markers coloring a cardboard box to her satisfaction. The real reason was much simpler: She was sad, and she was angry, and she didn't care what anyone thought of her. He hadn't been able to understand why a person as beautiful and witty and confident as Amelia could be unhappy. It was _wrong_, and it was fascinating, and it had been that visceral feeling of wrongness that had drawn him to her, as though she was a song being sung out of tune and if he could only get close enough and listen to it long enough then he could put it right.

Fancying her came later; much later. In the beginning, there was only empathy.

At first, she had not wanted to tell him about the Doctor. But he was patient, and he was earnest, and he always had a serious, gawkish sort of face that made people want to trust him, even when he was a child. In the end, she told him everything.

~o~

The game was never the same twice. Sometimes they would ransack her aunt's kitchen and he would sit at the scrubbed wooden table as she brought him bowl after plate after platter of food and he would eat obediently until he felt sick; sometimes they would rip her room apart looking for monsters, or for a crack in the wall that was not there. Sometimes they would go into the blue box in her yard together, sitting close enough for their scabbed knees and cherry-red noses to touch, and they would whisper together-or, more usually, she would whisper and he would listen, until the air became too stifling with spilled secrets and too hot with imaginings and they would have no choice but to burst out through the cardboard doors cheering and racing towards whatever strange and wondrous adventure Amelia had dreamed up this time: battling in the arenas of Ancient Rome or attending a Victorian tea party with Charles Dickens or searching the bushes for eyes, enormous eyes, horrible eyes, eyes which could talk. He never really understood that bit, but Amelia thought it was important, and so it was important to him, too. Whenever she screamed that she had found one he got to march forward, wave his screwdriver around to destroy it, and be the hero. He liked that bit of the game. And her eyes would light up as though she was reliving the most beautiful moment of her life, as she looked at him, and he liked that, too.

She always insisted that they hold hands while braving any imagined danger. She said it was because that was what the Doctor _did_. He never argued.

One time she made him enter the box alone, to wait for her signal to dictate when he could re-emerge to grandly invite her inside to join him. He waited and waited and waited for that signal, his lanky body curled and crouched inside the cramped box and the damp cardboard smell burning in the back of his throat. He waited for hours before finally pushing open the doors to discover that she had abandoned him, gone back indoors, and was almost finished polishing off the huge plate of cookies her aunt had baked for them to share. "My Raggedy Doctor doesn't like chocolate," was all she said, defiantly, as she licked the crumbs from her fingers. He went back to his own home early that afternoon, but he did not demand an apology, because he could see that her eyes and nose were still red and runny with crying.

~o~

Once they grew too old to squeeze into cardboard boxes together and too self-conscious to play make-believe games any longer and actually believe in them they spent hours in the school library instead, devouring every book the narrow metal shelves had on history, writing up lists of dates and important names, imagining what it would have been like to visit those different times and places. It was during one of their library visits, when he glanced absent-mindedly up from Book VI of a battered old copy of Plutarch's _Lives, _that he suddenly realized fully that Amelia wasn't just a girl, she was a _girl. _She suffered from no similar epiphany; to her, he had always been a nice boy. When he kissed her for the first time, she was not even surprised.

They did not talk about _time machines _any more. He aced every school history exam they were given up through their sophomore year of high school without even trying. She decided she wanted to be Cleopatra when she grew up.

~o~

Everyone in Leadworth except for Amelia herself was calling him her boyfriend by the time they graduated from high school. He wished they wouldn't, because he saw how trapped it made her feel; outsiders' expectations made her cruel to him when in company, calling him names or pushing him aside as though he did not matter. She never said she loved him, and she never said she was happy, but when they were alone they would go on drives or toss stale bread to the fat ducks swimming around in the duckpond or just sit on the swing in her garden, and sometimes, if he was lucky, there would be kissing involved, and sometimes, if he was lucky, he could make her laugh and feel one more note of the song of Amelia Pond slide into its proper place. Their strange, half-serious romance was merely a continuation of the game, really, with him still simply playing the role that she needed him to play, except now all their male peers envied him his part instead of mocking him for it.

That was about when she started calling herself Amy. The new name fitted her better, she said, because it was less "fairytale". He liked it just because it sounded more like his own.

~o~

He was twenty-three now, recently graduated with a degree in nursing, and even more recently hired by the local hospital to help tend to patients in the coma ward. The work was hard but he loved it because it enabled him to fulfill that instinctive need he had had ever since childhood to help anyone who was in pain or want; because he still _cared _about people just as earnestly and honestly as he had cared when he had been eight years old and had noticed Amelia Pond for the first time, not because she was pretty or because she sassed the teacher or because she lived alone with her aunt in that queer old rambling house, but because he had recognized that there was something broken in her that made her cry alone in the cloakroom and not lie about it afterwards.

She was twenty years old, beautiful, wild, and sarcastic, and if she was not entirely free of the unhappiness that had first drawn him to her all those years previously it was buried so deeply that even he could scarcely feel it, hidden down where he had helped her hide it and forget it with every step of the game: with every kiss and every history text and every time he had donned a ragged blue shirt that was too big for him, clasped her hand in his own, and promised her that everything was going to be fine. He did not know if he would ever manage to heal her completely, but he did know that he would never stop trying. He was a nurse, after all, and he loved her, and he knew by now that she loved him. Or, well, he was fairly certain she loved him. At least she never charged him for an in-costume snog.

She had not so much as mentioned the Doctor or his blue box in years.

Perhaps, someday soon, he would ask her to marry him.


End file.
